SANTA MONICA, Calif. -- We're waiting on Nintendo's press conference, due to start in about 10 minutes. The setting is a bit less dramatic than Microsoft's was last night. It's a pretty standard set up inside the Santa Monica Civic Center.

The decorations Nintendo chose speak to its strategy: About a dozen pictures of people of all ages playing with a Wii remote or quizzing themselves on a Nintendo DS. There's plenty of gray hair on the models in the photos and a fair number of people with perplexed but pleased looks on their faces, as if to suggest this is the first time they've played a video game, but they actually like it.